Before you continue, you should know that to really make use of App Master, your phone must be rooted. If you’re unsure about how to root your phone or what that even means, you should read our Android Rooting Guide.

Initial Impressions And Paying Up

If you are familiar with uninstalling apps using Titanium Backup, you will notice a number of key differences when you first launch App Master:

Right off the bat, the key advantages we get here:

A more focused experience: App Master is only about uninstalling your apps. With Titanium Backup, you must navigate submenus and an ocean of batch actions until you get to the uninstall feature. App Master puts it front and center.

A more modern look and feel: Titanium Backup literally looks like the granddad of Android apps. It’s been there forever, and it shows. App Master looks far better.

Better and safer usability: When you access Titanium Backup’s batch uninstall mode, all of your apps are selected for removal by default. Needless to say, that’s risky – and you must tap Deselect all to avoid them all being removed. This is not an issue with App Master – nothing is selected by default.

Clearer filtering: As you can see above, App Master cleanly separates user apps from system apps, without you having to fiddle with any complicated filters (something Titanium Backup requires).

With the app installed, it’s time to unlock it. Note that while it is much cheaper than Titanium Backup, it is not nearly as versatile – so price isn’t one of the advantages listed above. Here’s what unlocking looks like:

Of course, in between these two screenshots there’s a Google Play step where you actually get the unlocker and pay up. The unlocker is a separate app, which is better than in-app purchases because it can be more easily backed up, and does not require you to log into App Master with an account.

Above you can also see what the unlocker gives you. Our whole point here is the “batch silent uninstall” feature, which basically means you can select a number of apps for removal and App Master uninstalls them all without you having to confirm each individually (a major pain when trying to clean out your phone).

Selecting Apps For Removal

Okay, so now’s the time to select some apps for removal. A couple of things to note about this step:

The big touch targets make it easy to select apps. The entire row is a tap target – touch anywhere to select that app for removal.

If you see an app on the list but aren’t sure what it does, it’s easy to find out:

For example, I saw Holo Light Minimal, but wasn’t sure whether it was a theme or an icon pack. Tapping its tri-dot button and then Market detail clarified that in an instant: I was taken to its Google Play page where I could clearly see it’s an icon pack I’m not using at the moment, so it’s safe to remove.

This step is joyfully simple, and is the whole point of App Master: Just scroll through the list and select all the stuff you’d like to get rid of. Then, when you’re ready, tap the big Uninstall button at the bottom of the screen:

As you can see in the right screenshot above, App Master will then confirm, and by default offer to move your apps to an internal “recycle bin.” This is nice if you don’t use Titanium Backup, but really, I hope you already have some sort of robust backup strategy in place – in which case, you’re not going to need this.

Once you confirm, it’s time to get busy:

This is when you’ll first see App Master prompting for root permission – right before it actually needs that permission to do what you told it. It will then backup each app (if you told it to) and remove it.

A Closer Look At The Recycle Bin

Most experienced users will already have a backup strategy in place, and so may not need or want the internal backup feature (“recycle bin”). Still, I wanted to give you a closer look at it, because it does make App Master more accessible to beginners. After all, removing apps in bulk is scary, and being able to set them aside for later retrieval makes the process more palatable. Here’s what it looks like:

You can see which apps you’ve placed in the bin, and easily restore them. You can also remove individual apps from the recycle bin (i.e, permanently delete them), or empty the recycle bin in one fell swoop:

Better Than Titanium Backup… For App Removal

If you are looking for an accessible, simple, and straightforward way to bulk-remove apps from your Android Device, it is safe to say App Master would serve your needs better than Titanium Backup. I remain a loyal Titanium Backup user for what it was originally meant to do – backing up your Android apps – but when it comes to uninstalling things, App Master’s just plain better.

What do you use to bulk-remove apps you don’t use? Will you be giving App Master a try? Let me know in the comments.